Thread: Why Adobe may be good for the new ePub standard e-book format
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Old 10-06-2007, 01:24 PM   #47
wallcraft
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BKeeper View Post
I'm absolutely certain there will be plenty of easy and free ways to produce and read ePub documents. Anybody will be able to produce content.
ePub is a great step forward. Proper document structure (which allows reflow) will make the difference.
There were very similar sentiments expressed here about the earlier OEB standards - which proved to be optimistic. So far as I know, there are no open source tools to produce and manage OEB ebooks. The closest is perhaps the Open eBook Validator, which has not been kept up to date (there is no validator for ePub).

I agree that ePub is an advance on OEB. So perhaps that is enough to make ePub work as an open standard. The shoe that has not dropped yet is DRM. OEB was "hijacked" by DRM infested variants such as .mobi and .lit. The same could happen with .epub, but the problem with OEB was not that DRM came into the picture but that the DRM-free pure OEB did not catch on as an alternative. The reading software part of the equation seems to be progressing nicely, and FeedBooks providing .epub books is something that never happened with OEB. What we need now is open source tools to produce .epub ebooks.
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